Lawyer: Chemist was ‘eyeballing’ drugs

Matt StoutTuesday, September 25, 2012

Credit: Christopher Evans

CENTER OF CONTROVERSY: The William A. Hinton, MD State Laboratory Institute is in Jamaica Plain.

The accused rogue chemist at the center of the state’s drug lab scandal was “eyeballing” drug samples instead of testing and weighing them, and even mixed samples with drugs from a “stockpile” of evidence from the lab, claims the lawyer of one convicted drug dealer whose sentence yesterday was put on hold in the wake of the widening crisis.

Attorney Bernard Grossberg, in a motion filed in Suffolk Superior Court, painted new details of chemist Annie Dookhan’s alleged conduct, which has called into question more than 34,000 cases — 1,140 of which, officials announced yesterday, include current Bay State inmates.

Dookhan’s alleged mishandling “involved her ‘eyeballing’ seized substances, rather than submitting the substances to chemical testing,” Grossberg wrote in an affidavit arguing that a judge stay the drug and gun convictions of his client, David Huffman, because Dookhan handled the drugs involved. Judge Christine Roach agreed and set bail at $75,000 over the arguments of prosecutors, who said the gun Huffman admitted he had was an “independent act of criminality.”

“Most crucially,” Grossberg continued in the court filing, “she placed an amount or amounts of previously tested controlled substances from the state lab’s ‘stock pile’ of tested substances into the unknown seized substances, certified that the unknown substance was the previously tested substance, and thereby, contaminated the unknown substance.”

The allegations provide a deeper look into what is believed to be part of the attorney general and state police’s criminal investigation of Dookhan’s conduct. The decision to suspend Huffman’s sentences comes just weeks after he pleaded guilty on Aug. 1, and began concurrent 7- to 10-year sentences.

Also yesterday, David Meier, the lawyer appointed by Gov. Deval Patrick to lead the effort in assessing the scandal’s damage, said that 690 people currently serving state prison sentences and 450 in county jails had evidence in their cases handled by Dookhan.

Meier also wrote to prosecutors and attorneys that Dookhan appeared in court 150 times, including in 15 cases prosecuted in federal court.